Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

OVERVIEW
“Only if everyone – forces, PCCs, partners and
the communities in each area – really appreciate
the interplay between the various factors will
the service be able to respond effectively.”
The big problem with across the board
percentage cuts in funding is it assumes
that everyone is equally affected. This
is not so. The proportion of each force’s
budget which is met by grant ranges
from about 51 per cent to over 0
per cent.
The forces at the upper end of the
range have been worse affected in
cash terms. Broadly speaking, those
forces receive higher funding because
their formula assessed needs relative to
their local resources are proportionately
higher.
Moreover, an almost permanent
feature of the annual grant settlements
in recent years has been the application
of flat rate increases for every authority.
There are sound reasons for this – in a
time of reducing grants it has protected
individual authorities from being doubly
affected by a reduction in the grant pool
and a reduction in their local needs
assessment.
Clearly this strategy is more favourably
received by the potential losers, and it
is a fact that there are authorities now
whose grant receipts are well over 20m
a year lower than they would have been
had damping not been applied. The
range is now so great that it is doubtful
if it can be bridged in the foreseeable
future.
The facts are that for the first time in
recent memory, spending levels are going
down, and the impact is not being felt
equally across the country.
Value for money
Understanding the background is
important. Only if everyone – forces,
PCCs, partners and the communities
in each area – really appreciate the
interplay between the various factors will
the service be able to respond effectively.
Policing is a core public service, almost
unique in having powers of arrest and
prevention. It has come a long way from
its origins as primarily a crime fighting
service.
Successive Home Secretaries have
urged the service to refocus its efforts
on crime, but at the same time they
acknowledge and encourage the service’s
contribution to the wider prevention,
public protection and community safety
role.
As a nation, around 13bn a year is
spent on policing. At a time of tightening
resources, is there a realistic measure of
whether this outlay provides value for
money (VFM) The answer is probably
‘no’. One of the difficulties is that VFM
is often described purely in terms of cost
reduction. This ignores the many other
criteria by which effectiveness can be
measured
doing more for less
doing the same but better
customer satisfaction – making people
feel safer
meeting targets
contributing ‘assists’ to other services.
eal VFM in a time of reducing
resources should not be measured simply
in cash terms, but for convenience it
often is.
Discussions about the proper level
of resources for policing are also often
complicated – and at times distracted
– by political or emotive issues. The
ministerial focus on police officer
numbers has only recently been relaxed,
but in recent years it has meant that the
debate has often been narrowed down
to a single factor, when a wider more
objective approach would have been
more productive.
Overtime levels have become an
obsession, but as long as it is managed
properly, it can be a very cost effective
use of resources. Crime and detection
rates are a critical measure, but the
local or current context is often omitted.
In its later years the efficiency regime
eventually became a challenge to
find ever more imaginative ways of
recycling money within the budget, and
it measured everything in cash terms
when quality of service was an equally
important factor.
Bureaucracy and form filling has
quite rightly been in the spotlight, but
many of those who criticise the time
spent on carefully recording incidents
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